solvitur ambulando

A detail from a book I read years ago sometimes plays on my mind. The main character in the psychological thriller The Raw Shark Tests scribbles notes to his amnesiac self, who wakes each morning forgetting all he learnt yesterday about his mysterious condition. That’s the sole element of the strange story – aside from a vague recollection that “the shark” preys on memories – that sticks in my head. Post-it notes to a forgetting self.  Yesterday-you imploring your morning self to remember a vital something …

The message I repeatedly remember and forget: It is solved by walking. By “it” I mean all manner of pretzeled thought or mangled mood. Conditions I occasionally suffer from – especially in the first brush of the day.

When I wake, before I walk, I write. First, I brew the coffee, then I traipse to my desk. I’ve done this for years. It’s a compulsion. I devote this sacred hour to pen and paper. Sometimes I journal, but mainly I apply that still-waking self to “proper writing” – for wrestling thoughts into hopefully publishable form.

A dangerous pocket of time awaits on the other side of my writing hour. I don’t leap from my desk to the front door. Instead, I change out of my pajamas, tuck them under my pillow, and stare out the window. I consider the weather as I pull leggings and tops from the pile on my chair. I gather my keys and sunglasses. I hunt the house for the tangle of earphones I hide from my cat who regards these as his ball of string.

If my faffing squanders too much time – if, for example, I check my phone and fail to get those boots on fast enough, then the pressure of an oncoming day with emails, meetings, and deadlines can convince me I just don’t have the forty minutes my regular walk entails. I could forgo my usual ascent up to the cliffs of Howth. A brisk turn along the West Pier takes no more than twenty minutes. But my longer loop satisfies a deeper discipline. Whenever I forfeit my ritual altogether, whenever I dive straight into the workday, Yesterday-me yells into the void. A failed post-it note. I have missed my chance to unfurl the more inspired thought-forms which walking coaxes.

Speaking with Ezra Klein, the author of The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul says our minds evolved not to sit and concentrate, but to move outside, collecting clues from nature’s rhythmic patterns. Cognition and mental mapping unfold not within the head but beyond it. The brain offers a throne to the mind but does not contain it. Thinking happens as the mind stretches into the surroundings. Thinking struggles to relax and flow when forced to do its work alone, trapped at a desk, for too many hours, without external stimulation to spark it.

The BBC’s Michael Mosley reviews more of the science – walking briskly in the morning boosts the mood and deepens sleep.

In the book Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose our Way, Michael Bond explains our urge to keep on walking set homo sapiens apart from the Neanderthals and other now-extinct homo-species. Trekking supercharged the ancestral brain. Shaped it into a navigational organ first and foremost.

We are made for walking. The brain performs best that way. St. Augustine said more than a thousand years ago – Solvitur ambulando – it is solved by walking.

Today, I open my front door to an ancient stone abbey overlooking the harbour. Big, busty, crayon-coloured trawlers of red, green, blue lord over the small lobster boats. I turn from this view and take the worn, cobbled steps to the main road. I cut across to an abandoned lot before reaching Balscadden, the long stretch which hugs the bay, ascending toward East Mountain. Surrounded by gull cries, the sea’s inhalations and exhalations, the sloping stone pathways, I follow a robin who hops along branch by branch before me.

I walk with whatever I have been writing – mentally restructuring a piece, noting the sudden arrival of a fresh idea, examining a memory that wants to appear on the page.

When “the writing” tires itself and feels complete for the day, as I climb Cowbooters Lane toward the Lower Cliff Road, it might occur to me what to say or do to move a friendship or a client forward. Or, on those rare but still fiendish days, when my morning-mind storms with treacherous thought – pained and pointless ruminations, when the advice of my previous post fails! then there is no antidote more potent than my ritual cliff walk.

In the company of birdsong, seascape, and gorse-bloom, it is solved by walking.

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